"In their battle to erase sex differences in every facet of modern life, feminists have squared off against Mother Nature, and she's no feminist. All of these women who make the world worse by waging a destructive war between the sexes are at war with Mother Nature." Kate O'Bierne

Tamara Scott-Williams

I sat riveted by a television programme on the cable station EWTN this week. Kate O'Bierne, author of the new book Women Who Make the World Worse purported that the feminist movement has hurt (American) women far more than it has helped them over the last 40 years.

O'Bierne's interview cited examples of how feminism has devastated American society: fracturing families; indicting little boys as oppressors and potential rapists; making American schools and workplaces into battlefields to advance feminist causes; and criticisng working mothers who afford their children "a soulless" daycare upbringing.

O'Beirne suggests that the feminist agenda is, at its core, not pro-female at all; it is instead anti-male, and she dismisses the prevailing feminist's line that men are the enemy of women's progress, suggesting that it is the professional feminists (Sen Hillary Clinton, Jane Fonda, Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem and even "Carrie Bradshaw" of Sex and the City et al), that are most harming America and the rest of the world:

"The men in our lives can shape our views on the most destructive ideology afoot. I have long thought that if high-school boys had invited homely girls to the prom we might have been spared the feminist movement. We live with the destructive feminist agenda because the fathers or husbands of so many of them never failed to fail them. The views of these angry, abandoned women inform the modern women's movement."

O'Bierne is an excellent candidate for the feminist movement: she and her two sisters were raised by a single mother, and went to girl's schools until graduation from university and has the very "unfeminine" job of being the National Review's Washington editor, writing principally about Congress, politics, and domestic policy.

But she is not a feminist. She is the mother of two sons and theorises that American boys are hurting in schools because of the feminist movement. Feminising the classroom, she says, is to the detriment of (our) young men. Today "ants in the pants" disease is first being medicated by Ritalin et al, and diagnosed as ADD, instead of being accepted as normal and usual boy-child behaviour.

The cast of Sex and the City (from left) Cynthia Nixon, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kristin Davis

Her position is supported by Michael Gurian, who in a Washington Post "Outlook" piece, Disappearing Act: Where Have the Men Gone?, reports that colleges and universities across the country are "grappling with the case of the mysteriously vanishing male".

He claims that radical feminist academics, theorists, and activists, in the name of "educational equity" are to blame for boys' alienation from the current American school system.

Reading achievement, he says, is one example of what feminism has wrought, what with the rewriting of textbooks to conform to their notions of gender equality.

At its 1973 convention, NOW resolved to take "dramatic action" to see that dangerous sex-role stereotypes were erased from textbooks, and within a year they had the Women's Educational Equity Act to advance their campaign with funding for alternative curricula that yielded stories about adventurous and brave women which little boys have little interest in reading.

Gurian explains that boys "dominate the failure statistics in our schools" beginning in elementary school and continuing through high school. Boys lag behind girls in reading ability, a disparity that persists into college. This diminished educational achievement consigns young men to the lowest-level jobs, lands plenty in prison, and takes many out of the long-term marriage pool.

He lobbies for the American abandonment of the "boys-are-privileged-but-the-girls-are-shortchanged emphasis of the last 20 years". This "emphasis" that has so disadvantaged American boys is the main thrust of feminist educational policy that is subsidised by millions of public dollars in the name of "educational equity".

Both Gurian and O'Bierne put forward that it is actually men - and boys - who are bearing a considerable amount of the actual suffering. "Millions of schoolboys are being feminised in American classrooms; boys' sports are in retreat in schools everywhere; the "gender gap" deforms local and national politics; millions of husbands and fathers (and wives and mothers) believe that men are not needed in the raising of children

The worst thing that the women's movement has done, O'Bierne says, is that it "put us at war with the men in our lives, the fathers, husbands, and sons who love and support us. Because men don't like arguing with women and naively assumed that if they gave feminists what they wanted they would be left alone, the allegedly fierce patriarchy collapsed in the face of the feminist assault.

The moral intimidation feminists inflict on men means that other women have to take on the modern, destructive women's movement. The feminist message is crippling to our daughters, but we mothers of sons in particular have to defend our offspring."

How a seemingly positive ideological push (femininism) applied to education can wreak havoc on the citizens of a country as soon as one generation later is frightening. How feminism - American women are the most empowered in the world - has emasculated American men through the educational system, makes me wonder what damage could be done by teaching our children in patois/Jamaican language.

It strikes me that the American gender politics in education has shown itself to be as divisive and destructive as our our language politics of "Jamaicans who speak English are privileged and Jamaicans who speak patois are shortchanged" could be. And that any move to start teaching our children in patois is not pro-Jamaican but is instead anti-progress.

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